Things Undone: Final Cover

So NBM is listing my book finally and I've been posting on their blog some of the process I've gone through to create this latest work. Don't feel bad, I'll disclose more here when the time is right. But for now this will have to do. With a drop "dead" date of August...something or other it should prove to be a hot summer!

You may also notice I've updated my WWW.SHANEWHITE.COM site as well to start the promotion engine for this new project. Hopefully I'll have some preview pages up there when the time is right.

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Sideyard Basics

Looking out the window to my right this is what I see.

The Chestnut Hill School for Pale Young Children. I never knew there was such specialization in prep schools. Either way it was a nice chance to observe and study and try a whole host of new brushes with the Cintiq. For the most part it I realized a few things from this:

• I love light and color and finding the color harmony of a scene
• I get bored painting the same scenes, using the same colors...when it's nice in Seattle it really does look the same from painting to painting which means I need to paint earlier and later to avoid this trap
  
• I have a hard time finding interesting compositions which means perhaps I need to get out and shoot more photographs and/or do thumbnail quick sketches in watercolor
• I'm not a very good finisher. Once I get the color harmony I almost want to abandon the piece before I kill any of the energy which means perhaps I need to keep the big shapes of color blocky and lose the drawing bits and just find ways to go in and touch all the drawing again in the end ala Bongart (at least that's what it looks like to me)
• Landscapes make me lazy, there's too much I can fudge
• I wish the color picker was open and large and/or I could mix colors the way I do on a palette.

Well, onto to the next one...

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Ye Olde Turtle

It was time to throw down some graphite amidst all this digital dust.

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Mixt Ape

So I'm exploring some of the brushes and how to manipulate their settings in Photoshop. There's a lot of range and I end up getting lost when it comes to figuring out what options change what. Sometimes they seem to work in tandem. I'm such a newbie at this.

Anyway the top one I started with big swaths of color and tried to find my drawing in it. I think a lot of people are doing that these days with very little thought beforehand. At least that's what it looks like to me. Yet for whatever reason they have better results.

The second one was a value study as well as focus on just painting a face. I mean, for some reason I never seem to quite get the brush strokes right. It looks beaten out of metal as opposed to whipped out of the end of some bristles. More practive obvisouly is needed. I decided to try another popular thing which is applying a color Overlay in PS to the grayscale. It works okay, but just seems boring to me.

Now if I can just gain the confidence in starting a figure piece like I did with the top one we'll be getting somewhere.

I need to get back to drawing from life...no way around it. Sketching from life only gets you so far. Clear, focused observation now that's something I can get behind.

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Three Outta Wacom

So this is what I get outta my Wacom tablet. Dare I say it's a bit beneath what I'm really capable of? I think so. I mean, there's some color theory that's fun, but really you can teach a monkey good color theory, but you can't make him paint pretty.

At least I think that's true...anyone?

Then again, maybe not. Perhaps I'm blaming my clumsy use of a tool for what I'm really not capable of rendering. I think there's a saying about that somewhere. Maybe the previous example and these above are really not that different. But in my mind, it feels different because the control is more immediate on the Cintiq as opposed to the Wacom.

A mind is a terrible thing.

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The Cintiq Made Me Do This

I'm starting that sideward spiral into the infinite digital realm. My friend Joe got me inspired to start doing some of this stuff. The Wacom is not my friend. It's a disconnection from you and the actually substrate, something I've struggled with for quite some time. This...this is more akin to how I think and draw.

What's a Cintiq you may ask? It's a monitor that you can draw on with pressure-sensitivity and full-range of motion. (And any one reading this blog 50 years from now will equate it to a teletype machine of the 1920s).

At any rate, I hope to have more of these indulgent sketches soon.

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Over-sized

This piece is for issue #25 of PROOF by Alex Grecian and Riley Rossmo. I did this on 15 1/2" x 24" 75 lb. kraft paper. The problem is, with the new ink I used it was a bit watery and the whole thing keeps buckling. I even flattened it out for a few days which helped but given time it wants to buckle again.

Makes me concerned as I'm preparing to do my next project on the same substrate at that size.
Need to find an alternative if possible but the pickings are slim.

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Ancient Youth

Here are a couple more concepts from the next project. Trying to make sure I can use the same approach to render beauty as I do the horror. It can be a fine line as to whether or not I get too ham-fisted in my line weight when I start wandering with the brush. It requires greater previsualizing as I lay down only the largest of penciled shapes.

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Staying Sober

If you ever want to know how well a script is working write it and then don't look at it for a year or two. Then pull it out and prepare to do thumbnails for it. That's what I did for this project. I've been working on the story since 1998. The last two weeks of 2007 or 2006 I wrote it with the plot that I had feverishly come up with. The dialogue on the other hand...was terrible!

I squirmed the whole time reading this and yet believing that the story was still salvageable. I think there's some promise but first things first, I'm going to cut everything that is extemporaneous out. Then...I'm going to go in and see if I can tell the story with the pictures that are there. If not, I'll do what I can to take the playwright approach to it and move the story through the characters dialogue. My hope is to avoid any narration.

Each book I do I find myself with a new clear challenge that I have yet to face. It's good in many ways because it keeps me problem-solving in entirely new ways. If I have any doubt of myself as a creator it's quickly multiplied with each project. So this...this lesson is all about better writing, and keeping the art process as simple and straight-forward as can be. I want that part to be fun, and energetic.

This is supposed to be a five-issue series, but if I have my way I'd like to set it up as a full-color graphic novel. I prefer longer works and I think it allows me to focus on the story instead of the desperation of a monthly package that has to win over the already skeptical consumer. Besides I don't want to wait for a trade to curl up with.

So we'll see, I have no idea when this will be out or who will publish it. I do know that it's one of the two projects that I am focused on completing come hell or high water. With as much global warming as we had and our faith put into technology, I hope neither of those two conditions come to pass.

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